Who's the best tennis player of all time?
Ranking of top male tennis players produces some surprises
2011-03-02
(Press-News.org) EVANSTON, Ill. --- Fans may think of Jimmy Connors as an "old school" tennis player, but according to a new ranking system developed by a Northwestern University researcher, Connors is best player in the history of the game.
The rankings are published in PLoS ONE, a journal published by the Public Library of Science.
Male tennis players who played in at least one Association of Tennis Professionals match between 1968 and 2010 were evaluated through network analysis, said Filippo Radicchi, author of the study.
Ranking tennis players is a novel way to show how complex network analysis can reveal interesting facts hidden in statistical data, said Radicchi, a physicist and postdoctoral fellow in the chemical and biological engineering department of Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Radicchi ran an algorithm, similar to the one used by Google to rank Web pages, on digital data from hundreds of thousands of matches. The data was pulled from the Association of Tennis Professionals website. He quantified the importance of players and ranked them by a "tennis prestige" score. This score is determined by a player's competitiveness, the quality of his performance and number of victories.
"In this particular ranking system, it's more important to win a single match against a very good player than many matches against not-so-good players," said Radicchi, who conducted the research in the lab of Luís Amaral, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School.
Here's how the top 30 rank:
Jimmy Connors
Ivan Lendl
John McEnroe
Guillermo Vilas
Andre Agassi
Stefan Edberg
Roger Federer
Pete Sampras
Ilie Năstase
Björn Borg
Boris Becker
Arthur Ashe
Brian Gottfried
Stan Smith
Manuel Orantes
Michael Chang
Roscoe Tanner
Eddie Dibbs
Harold Solomon
Tom Okker
Mats Wilander
Goran Ivanišević
Vitas Gerulaitis
Rafael Nadal
Raul Ramirez
John Newcombe
Ken Rosewall
Yevgeny Kafelnikov
Andy Roddick
Thomas Muster
"One of the reasons Jimmy Connors ranks on top is because he played for more than 20 years and had the opportunity to win a lot of matches against other very good players," Radicchi said.
He expects current greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to eventually move up in the rankings if they face tough competition and continue to win matches. Radicchi, a lifelong tennis fan, plans to run this study again in 10 years to see how the rankings change.
"The rankings are a snapshot of who is at the top at this time," Radicchi said. "Players who have yet to retire are penalized with respect to those who have ended their careers. Prestige scores strongly correlate with the number of victories, and active players haven't played all the matches of their careers yet."
Researching and ranking sports stars gives a glimpse at the power of complex network analysis.
"The same application could be used to rank countries involved in the global trade of certain commodities," Radicchi said. "In general, this type of analysis can help scientists better explain and understand complicated global relationships."
INFORMATION: END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2011-03-02
Low self-esteem is associated with a greater risk of mental health problems such as eating disorders and depression. From a public health perspective, it is important for staff in various health-related professions to know about self-esteem. However, there is a vast difference between the research-based knowledge on self-esteem and the simplified popular psychology theories that are disseminated through books and motivational talks, reveals research from the University of Gothenburg.
Current popular psychology books distinguish between self-esteem and self-confidence. ...
2011-03-02
Diatoms account for a large proportion of the phytoplankton found in the water, and live both in the open sea and in freshwater lakes. By reviving 100-year-old spores that had laid buried and inactive in bottom sediment, researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have shown that diatoms are also genetically stable and survival artists.
Recent research has shown that diatoms exhibit great genetic differences and that they occur in discrete populations, which means that they multiply sexually to a greater extent than previously believed. What makes diatoms special ...
2011-03-02
Los Angeles, CA (February 28, 2011) Eating more tomatoes and tomato products can make people healthier and decrease the risk of conditions such as cancer, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease, according to a review article the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, (published by SAGE).
Of all the non-starchy vegetables, Americans eat more tomatoes and tomato products than any others. Researchers Britt Burton-Freeman, PhD, MS, and Kristin Reimers, PhD, RD of the National Center for Food Safety & Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology and ConAgra Foods, Inc., ...
2011-03-02
Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are developing a solid composite material to help cool small, powerful microelectronics used in defense systems. The material, composed of silver and diamond, promises an exceptional degree of thermal conductivity compared to materials currently used for this application.
The research is focused on producing a silver-diamond thermal shim of unprecedented thinness – 250 microns or less. The ratio of silver to diamond in the material can be tailored to allow the shim to be bonded with low thermal-expansion stress ...
2011-03-02
New findings published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, confirm the risk of breast cancer among women who are obese and not physically active, and suggests additional mechanisms beyond estrogen.
Scientists from the Women's Health Initiative have found a relationship between obesity, physical activity and triple-negative breast cancer, a subtype of breast cancer characterized by a lack of estrogen, progesterone and HER2 expression. Triple-negative breast cancers account for about 10 to 20 percent ...
2011-03-02
SEATTLE – Millions of people worldwide may be at risk of early death from diabetes and related cardiovascular illnesses because of poor diagnosis and ineffective treatment, a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington shows. The study examines diabetes diagnosis, treatment, and management in Colombia, England, Iran, Mexico, Scotland, Thailand, and the United States.
In the United States alone, nearly 90% of adult diabetics – more than 16 million adults aged 35 and older – have blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol ...
2011-03-02
EDITOR'S PICK - DREADD-ing your next meal
In the face of the growing obesity epidemic, much research has focused on the neuronal control of feeding behavior. Agouti-related protein (AgRP) neurons express three proteins that have been implicated in changes in energy balance, but the studies linking AgRP neurons to feeding behavior have produced mixed results.
To directly analyze the role of AgRP neurons, Bradford Lowell and colleagues, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, used DREADD technology (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs) ...
2011-03-02
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, beating the diffraction limit of light.
Previously, the standard optical microscope can only see items around one micrometre – 0.001 millimetres – clearly.
But now, by combining an optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the 'microsphere nanoscope', the Manchester researchers can see 20 times smaller – 50 nanometres ((5 x 10-8m) – under normal lights. This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy.
This ...
2011-03-02
Intensive adherence counseling around the time of HIV treatment initiation significantly reduces poor adherence and virologic treatment failure in sub-Saharan Africa whereas using an alarm device has no effect, according to a study in this week's PLoS Medicine by Michael Chung from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and colleagues.
The findings of this study define an adherence counseling protocol that is effective; these findings are relevant to other HIV clinics caring for large numbers of patients in sub-Saharan Africa.
As poor adherence to HIV treatment ...
2011-03-02
Effectiveness and cost effectiveness of expanding harm reduction and antiretroviral therapy in a mixed HIV epidemic: a modeling analysis for Ukraine
A new study from Stanford researchers published in PLoS Medicine makes the case that a combination of methadone substitution therapy and anti-retroviral treatment would have the greatest effect on reducing new infections and improving quality of life in a region where HIV is spreading rapidly among intravenous drug users.
In the past decade, an epidemic of HIV has swept through Ukraine, fueled mostly by intravenous drug ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Who's the best tennis player of all time?
Ranking of top male tennis players produces some surprises
